Wednesday, 25 June 2008

It's time to put James Hansen on trial for fraudulent science

So Al Gore stooge and Climate High Priest James Hansen now wants to put oil company CEOs on trial for 'crimes against humanity'?

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

You mean the James Hansen whose software code is so robust and whose algorithms are so sound that he is 99% certain that we're all doomed?

Luckily for the real world, Steve McIntyre has been doing yeoman's work analysing Hansen's code:

Here are some more notes and scripts in which I’ve made considerable progress on GISS Step 2. As noted on many occasions, the code is a demented mess - you’d never know that NASA actually has software policies (e.g. here or here . I guess that Hansen and associates regard themselves as being above the law. At this point, I haven’t even begum to approach analysis of whether the code accomplishes its underlying objective. There are innumerable decoding issues - John Goetz, an experienced programmer, compared it to descending into the hell described in a Stephen King novel. I compared it to the meaningless toy in the PPM children’s song - it goes zip when it moves, bop when it stops and whirr when it’s standing still. The endless machinations with binary files may have been necessary with Commodore 64s, but are totally pointless in 2008.

Because of the hapless programming, it takes a long time and considerable patience to figure out what happens when you press any particular button. The frustrating thing is that none of the operations are particularly complicated.

There's much more of that at Climateaudit, one of the most important sites on the web today in the field of climate science.

I’m finally stating to come up for air after dealing with the fetid grubs and maggots of Hansen’s code. Needless to say, key steps are not mentioned in the underlying publications, Hansen et al 1999, 2001. I’m not going to discuss these issues today. Instead, I want to show 3 case studies where I’ve been successful in replicating the Hansen adjustment. In the more than 20 years since Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 and the nearly 10 years since Hansen et al 1999, to my knowledge, no third party has ever examined Hansen’s adjustments to see if they make any sense in individual cases. Some of the adjustments are breathtakingly bizarre. Hansen says that he doesn’t “joust with jesters”. I guess he wants center stage all to himself for his own juggling act.

NASA recently had to correct an error in Hansen's work after McIntyre pointed out an error. The result was that the warmest year in the US record now belongs to 1934 not 1998.

The fact is that Hansen has been fudging the temperature data for many years and the consequence has been to increase apparent recent warming.

It's climate scientists like Hansen who should be put on trial. Because of people like him money that could be used for worthy causes such as those listed at the Copenhagen Consensus Centre go unfunded.

I've pointed out previously that James Hansen will be remembered in history alongside other scientific fraudsters such as Lysenko and Hwang. The sooner his scam is exposed to the world the better off we'll all be.

15 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Your tone of desperation is unmistakeable. Your anti-intellectualism is so rabid that you simply make things up to try to discredit, in your own mind, people far cleverer than you could ever hope to be.

The bug that Steve McIntyre found in the GISS code only affected temperatures measured after 2000, and only in the United States; it did not, and could not, change the relative ranking of 1998 and 1934. It did not, and could not, affect the reality that the world is warming rapidly due to anthropogenic alteration of the composition of the atmosphere.

What I do not understand is how Dr Hansen can make such overtly political statements, including the mooted threat to campaign against members of congress he is opposed to, and still retain his tenure as a paid employee of a federal organisation - NASA ?

If he is in fact a civil servant, is he not bound by some codes of conduct, because the line between Dr Hansen of NASA GISS and Mr Hansen, climate activist, seem pretty blurry ?

I struggle to think of another public employee in the Anglosphere who proposes to appear before the elected representatives of his government after declaring publically that he is considering direct political intervention to unseat several of those same representatives ?

Can you imagine the scandal in Australia if Ken Henry of the Treasury popped up and said the government was just plain wrong on things like energy, immigration or water and that he would be on the hustings to unseat the relevant ministers at the next election ??

How no one taps Dr Hansen on the shoulder and suggests he might be more appropriately taking his advocacy off the public payroll is amazing ! He must write his own annual performance appraisal, lucky bugger.

Ha ha ha ha ha! Do you really think that by claiming to be a computer programmer, you give your ridiculous views any weight whatsoever? Who the fuck needs credentials, anyway? I'm not doing any science here, just pointing out what is already known and studied, and what you and Lacton are not capable of understanding properly.

You are an idiot. Despite the most wishful thinking of climate morons, no-one has 'disowned' the so-called hockey stick. It's been independently verified by numerous studies. What '1998 error' are you on about? What have I ever said about the Mediaeval Warm Period? Why are you just making any old shit up? You should get a grip and stop being so paranoid. You are a stupid, stupid person.

The 1998 error is meant to be the huge error that Hansen made in 2000. Although the amount may have been small the fact that such an error could be made is a huge problem for those who rely on Climate Liars like Hansen.